The Schwartz Cloud Report

SAP Brings HANA to the Cloud

Often noted for moving slow to the cloud, SAP used its annual TechEd conference in Las Vegas to pick up the pace.

The move comes just two weeks after its key rival Oracle extended its cloud services and applications portfolio at its annual OpenWorld conference. While SAP has moved to offer more of its applications as a service and has made some key acquisitions to extend those offerings such as its $3.4 billion deal to buy SuccessFactors, now the company is adding some key platform services.

Notable on the cloud front at TechEd this week was the HANA in-memory database, used for building apps that perform real-time analytics incorporating large amounts of data. The new SAP HANA Cloud is targeted at developers who want to build modern applications using native HANA, Java and other development environments.

SAP HANA Cloud is designed to integrate with portals, support application integration, enable mobile development and allow developers to build apps that enable business intelligence and collaboration.

The first application service SAP is offering with HANA Cloud is NetWeaver Cloud, designed to let enterprise developers and ISVs build Java-based apps with modern UIs for mobile devices and consumer-type apps, which integrate premise-based and cloud apps. Along with the NetWeaver Cloud launch, SAP released a free unlimited developer license, removing a previous restriction of 90 days. HANA Cloud also includes a database as a service offering called HANA DBServices.

In addition to launching its own platform as a service (PaaS), SAP launched HANA One platform, which allows shops to provision HANA on Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 service on the fly. Developers can provision up to 60GM of memory per instance, which is suited for transaction oriented and apps that require real time analytics.

Developers can provision HANA ONE via the AWS Marketplace. Pricing starts at $.99 per hour for the use of SAP's software. "Because you can now launch HANA in the cloud, you don't need to spend time negotiating an enterprise agreement, and you don't have to buy a big server," wrote AWS evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. "If you are running your startup from a cafe or commanding your enterprise from a glass tower, you get the same deal. No long-term commitment and easy access to HANA, on an hourly, pay-as-you-go basis, charged through your AWS account."